


well, i guess this is growing up

by mayfriend



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Brotherly Bonding, Drug Withdrawal, Gen, Good Brother Klaus Hargreeves, Immortal Klaus Hargreeves, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Protective Klaus Hargreeves, no beta we die like ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 19:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18533737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayfriend/pseuds/mayfriend
Summary: He doesn’t like to linger on it, but he thinks some things could probably kill him better than others. Drugs don't seem to do the trick, neither do head wounds or blood loss. The longest time between dark and light was when he got shot in the lung after some idiot decided to end his hallucinations with bullets more real than them.When he sees the wave of flame coming, burning up the horizon, Klaus has just enough time to thinkyes, this should do itbefore it all goes dark.(What a fucking let down.)AKA: Klaus and Number Five reunite in the ashes of everything and everyone they've ever known. Klaus comes to the conclusion that he may have to shape the fuck up.





	well, i guess this is growing up

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by queerklaus' [post](https://mayfriend.tumblr.com/post/183433452080/klaus-is-immortal-and-thats-the-tea/), and my overwhelming desire for baby Five not to be completely alone in the apocalypse. 
> 
> Title from Blink 182's Dammit:  
>  _But everybody's gone,_  
>  _And I've been here for too long,_  
>  _To face this on my own, well I guess this is growing up,_  
>  _I guess this is growing up._

Klaus overdoses for the first time at fifteen.

He wakes up in the hospital as his stomach is being pumped, and it feels like his insides have been thrown into a cement mixer. The doctors tell him he's lucky to be alive, but Klaus knows better.

In the years following, he makes sure he shoots up in the Academy, or near enough to it that if somebody finds him, they'll take him to the infirmary. Klaus hates hospitals almost as much as he hates the mausoleum - there is so much death, so much endless suffering in those sterile halls, and nobody knows better than him. He wonders how the people who work there can’t sense it, when every molecule of his body screams at the wrongness - the crushing fullness of the corridors, the layered, lost spirits in the theatres, the tickle of a not-breath on the back of your neck.

When he finally leaves the Academy, floating high as a kite with Ben’s ghost dogging at his heels, he becomes a regular at crackhouses; places where nobody will call an ambulance for fear of the cops coming along for the ride, places where people will write off having seen a dead guy come back to life as the result of a bad trip.

He’s been using since he was still half a child (as much as any of them were ever children), but Klaus tries to minimise the casualties. Truly, he does. He can't do anything about Ben; Ben is the only ghost that won't be banished with drugs and drink, the only one that Klaus deep down wants to stay, and Klaus can't make himself try and send him away for temporary relief, a fleeting moment of privacy - not when he might actually succeed. If he didn't have Ben, he wouldn't have anyone, and Klaus is selfish to the bone.

How many times has Ben begged him not to take the hit, snort the line, press the plunger? How many times has Ben screamed at him as the world fades to grey, called him a coward and a bastard and a dumbass and _brother,_ and how many times has Klaus ignored him because it is easier, because it hurts less, because he can? How long is a piece of string?

But yes, separation. He likes to think he’s gotten it down to a fine art. He doesn’t write birthday cards, doesn’t keep an address, point-blank refuses to get a telephone. Those few occasions when he sees a face he recognises, he turns on his heel and retreats. Despite it all, he doesn’t entirely succeed. Sometimes, more often than acceptable, Klaus fucks up. He curls up in the wrong alleyway and some well-intentioned idiot calls 911. There are a few ways it can go from there; perhaps Diego will pick up the code on his radio, and come tearing into the alleyway with fire in his eyes and shaking hands. Perhaps Allison will get a call asking for money for the ambulance rides, for rehab (she's the one everybody knows about, after all. Her and Sir Reginald, and the old man wants as little to do with Klaus as Klaus does with him). He never understands why she always pays. She must know why he does what he does, why he won’t (can’t) ever stop.

Diego gets mad, when he wakes. Tells him _you're so fucking stupid_ and _one day you're gonna be past saving_ and there are other things he doesn’t say that linger in the air all the same: _you’re scaring me, you’re killing yourself, I don’t know how to help you and I’m starting to think I can’t_. Allison, her voice a crackle over the phone, gets quiet. She tried to visit in person once, just the once, and Klaus scrambled out the window still clad in a hospital gown, afraid she'd Rumour him sober. He can't risk it, can't risk the haunting that comes with clean.

One time - he doesn't know what the fuck he was thinking - he went to Vanya. She made him up a little bed on her sofa and stayed up all night with him; in the morning, her eyes were so red and sore that it must have hurt to even blink, and she watched him with what looked unsettling like hope as he ate four slices of toast that she thrust in his lap.

Klaus never went back.

It’s never Luther, even though Klaus knows he never left the Academy, is still living in that beautiful, terrible house that Klaus never gets within two square miles of, no matter what. Klaus is grateful for these small mercies; he thinks if Luther saw him in the gutter, he might just walk on by. Not know him as his brother at all. That might be better than one of his lectures, his self-righteousness, his not-really-disappointment that has been inevitable since they were knock-kneed children with the world on their shoulders.

He doesn’t like to linger on it, but he thinks some things could probably kill him better than others. Drugs don't seem to do the trick, neither do head wounds or blood loss. The longest time between dark and light was when he got shot in the lung after some idiot decided to end his hallucinations with bullets more real than them.

When he sees the wave of flame coming, burning up the horizon, Klaus has just enough time to think _yes, this should do it_ before it all goes dark.

(What a fucking let down.)

He wakes in hell. That's the only way he can describe it. A barren world, of rubble and ash, of orange and grey, of charcoal and copper. Klaus groans, shifts, coughs. A kid screams _no!_ from a distance - it echoes, stretching into one long lament - and Klaus agrees with the sentiment wholeheartedly. The world spins when he opens his eyes to the bright, burning sun.

He's too weak to rise, pinned as he is. Absentmindedly, Klaus wonders if he'll finally die of starvation or dehydration first. The idea that he might not die of either is too horrible to contemplate. In the corner of his eye dark shapes flicker into being, but when he tries to move his head to see the phantoms he realises they’re just spots on his vision. His head aches. Everything aches.

Movement. He doesn’t know how long its been. He’s so tired. A face appears above him. For a moment, he thinks its another ghost. Dark hair, big eyes, tear-streaked cheeks. He knows that face, something in the back of his mind chitters shrilly, he knows that face as well as he knows his own-

A portrait hanging above the fireplace. A smirk across the dinner table. A picture printed on the back of the milk carton.

"Klaus?" Five says, voice breaking.

For lack of anything else to do, Klaus starts crying too.

* * *

He's half out of his mind from pain and the shakes, and that more than anything convinces him that this isn't one long, terrible trip. It's been almost seventeen years since he last saw Five, and he looks exactly the same. Like, _exactly_ , down to the slightly crooked tie and side-parted hair and those terrible fucking shorts. The world around the two of them is eerily still, even devoid of ghosts for the present, something Klaus never thought would be so scary.

Klaus babbles to Five as his (little?) brother digs him out of the wreckage of their home, his skinny arms trembling under the weight of the brick and mortar. _I tried conjuring you,_ he tells his sibling, _so many times. I couldn't, I couldn't- I thought it was me, I thought that I wasn’t strong enough, I tried so hard-_

Sixteen years. Sixteen years. Five's been gone longer than he was ever there. Klaus still tried conjuring him though, every anniversary, no matter how fucked he was at the time. Ben had tried to tell him to stop torturing himself when they both knew that if Five was going to answer he'd have done it years before–

Ben.

That’s what’s wrong about this picture- rather, that’s what’s _most_ wrong. Klaus woke without Ben. He starts swearing then, not that he wasn’t before, but _really_ swearing. Loud and horrified and hoarse, and Five starts shaking as Klaus grows wilder, wilder-

Time skips. Klaus comes to almost entirely free of his stony-grave, and is able to lift his hand to his temple, feel the blood congealing there. “You knocked me out?” He says to Five, stunned, struck by the obvious (and, by the feels of it, a hunk of cement. Fucking _ow)_.

“You were panicking,” Five says shortly, conceitedly - if it weren’t for the setting, Klaus could have sworn he was thirteen years old again, and Five was talking down to him about some advanced concept Klaus was too stupid to understand, a curl to his lip and pride in his eyes.

“Yeah,” Klaus agrees, “Yeah.”

What’s more insane, he doesn’t say, is that Five is _not._

(What’s more insane is that Five is even here. What’s more insane is that Five is alive. What’s most insane is that he’s thirteen years old, at the end of the fucking world.)

When he’s three-quarters free, Klaus is able to help unearth his lower legs, sitting up with cracking joints and burning muscles and black spots dancing across his vision. “Fivey,” he says to his brother, who is still bent over, automatically reaching out for him like they only saw each other yesterday.

“Don’t call me that,” Five snaps, still picking up rocks with his bloody hands.

“Fivey,” Klaus says again, and Five turns to him, face twisted in a snarl- Klaus pulls him into a hug, and holds him. Instinctively, Five tries to pull away, but he gives up quicker than he would if it wasn’t just a token effort. He buries his face into Klaus’ collarbone. He doesn’t hug him back, but after a few moments he starts to cry, sniffling and shaking and Klaus holds him, holds him, holds him like their dad would never hold them.

When he remembered Five, he remembered his superior manner, his sharp words, his phasing in and out of reality as integral to his memory as breath to was to most. Klaus had been taller than Five, even back then - but Klaus had often been the tallest of his siblings growing up, it was only in those final few years that Luther outstripped him - but Five had seemed _big._ He cast a long shadow, one that grew longer still in his absence.

He’s seventeen years older than Five, give or take a couple months, and he’s still the taller of the both of them for obvious reasons. But- he hadn’t expected to find Five quite so small as he did. He’d been a poor excuse of an adult, and a poorer excuse for a brother; Five was a child, a _child,_ and Klaus finally understood that he wasn’t one anymore.

They’re at the end of the world, and all Klaus has is Five and all Five has is Klaus.

Right then. Time to rise to the occasion, asshole.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [mayfriend](http://mayfriend.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
